The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulator. In the clip, robed cultists zip around on pigs, fire machine guns, and the sequence culminates with an image of massive, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. What didn’t make the final edit was the infamous snake gun, a quirky weapon that Joe Dietsch, the chief executive officer and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, says was born from a child’s imagination.
According to Dietsch, one of the developers’ sons asked, “What would a snake‑shooting gun look like?” The team had built a flexible weapon‑creation tool that let them prototype a new gun in roughly thirty minutes. The result was a literal snake‑firing firearm that remains in the game, a testament to the studio’s rapid‑iteration mindset. That anecdote captures the chaotic, sandbox‑style gameplay that Join Us promises: an open‑world survival experience where players can recruit followers—or invite friends in co‑op mode—to join a 1970s‑styled cult.
It also highlights Wolf Haus’s technology‑first philosophy, which has enabled a small crew to produce a high‑fidelity title that would normally require a much larger staff. Michael Abbott, the company’s chief operating officer, summed it up: “We set out to be disruptors. We told everyone we could build a AAA‑quality game with just twelve people, and most thought we were crazy.” The team’s confidence stems from a background in indie filmmaking, where they learned to achieve big results on shoestring budgets.
Abbott, the son of veteran Hollywood makeup artist Larry Abbott, helped launch Ascendant Pictures—a production house founded by Chris Roberts before his work on Star Citizen—and later produced films such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Dietsch, meanwhile, studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, the son of Mel Gibson and a fellow Wolf Haus co‑founder. Together they co‑wrote and co‑directed indie features like Happy Hunting and Manifest West. Their cinematic pedigree gave them a knack for punching above their weight, a skill they transferred to game development.
Funding the project was a long slog. Wolf Haus pitched the concept roughly 80 times before securing equity investments from Krafton and Lifelike Capital.
Those partners took a stake in the studio, allowing the team to retain creative control while financing development. The origin story of Join Us begins with Dietsch tinkering in Unreal Engine.
He discovered that the engine could be downloaded for free and, after countless YouTube tutorials, started building small prototypes. Though he had no formal training in game creation, his love of both video games and grindhouse cinema inspired a “doomsday cult simulator” that merged survival mechanics with the aesthetic of 1970s exploitation films.
He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, showed it to Abbott, and the two took the concept to Dooma, a partner studio that helped refine the vision. Another key figure is Dooma CFO and narrative director Dooma Wendschuh. He began his career as a film producer and screenwriter before moving into games in the early 2000s, contributing writing to titles such as Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins through his company Sekretagent Productions.
In the 2010s he founded several tech ventures, most notably a cannabis formulation firm called Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million (US$330 million). After the sale, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, planning to retire. Yet a call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back into development when he saw Dietsch’s demo and was blown away.
Wendschuh then recruited Reid Schneider, former Warner Bros. Games VP and current head of Raccoon Logic (the studio behind Journey to the Savage Planet), as a strategic advisor.
Schneider brought in Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, to serve as chief technology officer. With this leadership in place, the studio turned its attention to financing. Pitching began in the summer of 2023, a period marked by an industry downturn. After initial outreach, Wolf Haus signed with CAA in Los Angeles, which helped them secure a seed round from Lifelike Capital and Krafton in 2024.
The partnership with CAA—also representing titles like 007: First Light—proved invaluable, as did the involvement of seasoned veterans Schneider and Chartrand. “Our agent Derek Douglas had represented me for twelve years in games and previously ran the video‑game division at William Morris,” Wendschuh notes, underscoring the importance of industry connections.
Despite the high ambitions, the studio remains lean: only 13 full‑time staff members. Dietsch explains that the team deliberately kept the roster small to ensure everyone could contribute creatively and feel ownership over the final product. To make a sprawling open‑world game feasible with such a tiny crew, Wolf Haus invested heavily in custom tooling early in development.
"If a system needs to scale, a single developer must be able to debug it," Dietsch says. The first year was split between ideating gameplay and building the internal tools that would later support the entire world map. Funding from Krafton and Lifelike allowed the studio to self‑finance the game’s development. The equity investors are motivated to increase the studio’s enterprise value, which aligns with Wolf Haus’s philosophy of building reusable tools for future projects.
While this approach can slow short‑term progress, it empowers a small team to create a complex experience without external pressure to cut corners. When asked about generative AI, both Dietsch and Wendschuh are unequivocal: the studio does not rely on AI for creative work. "We believe a human touch is essential for games," Dietsch says.
"We might use AI for scheduling or email replies, but never for art, design, or narrative." Krafton, which markets itself as an “AI‑first” company, actually required Wolf Haus to avoid generative AI in the creative pipeline, echoing similar stances from other Krafton‑owned studios like Neon Giant. Wendschuh emphasizes that AI threatens jobs for voice actors and artists, and the team wants to protect those roles. Consequently, the six‑kilometer‑square map in Join Us is handcrafted, and the game’s 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors—a point of pride for the developers. Dietsch reflects on the contrast between film and game production.
In cinema, an idea can take years to materialize, subject to studio approvals and the availability of A‑list talent. In games, an idea can be prototyped in a single morning, placed directly into the engine, and iterated upon instantly. This immediacy, he argues, lowers the barriers to entry and makes it easier for small teams to achieve success without needing celebrity endorsements.
Both mediums, however, share a core purpose: delivering an experience, telling a story, and engaging an audience. Dietsch’s childhood wish to create either movies or games came down to a coin toss and a camera for Christmas. He learned programming on a TI‑83 calculator, and that dual passion has guided his career ever since.
Today, Wolf Haus’s Join Us stands as a proof that a small, focused team—backed by Hollywood know‑how, savvy tech development, and disciplined financing—can produce a large‑scale, high‑quality game without leaning on generative AI.